Related News
- Red cadres beat Centre’s forces to Nandigram
- How CPI(M) captured Nandigram
- Police watch as CPI(M) recaptures Nandigram
Posts and Articles
- Where Party Rules: Only an incompetent government sanctions terror
- For an extremely balanced reaction and analysis of the situation:
Nandigram & The Terrors of Tomorrow
and an follow-up post
Nandigram: What Movement? Why? - Nandigram violence was ‘state sponsored massacre’
- Who are you fighting with ?
- Nandigram and the need to remember
This blog started very humbly at the end of May, ‘07. I posted my writings (mainly as a kind of preparation towards a novel), contemplations on art, love, urban melancholia, life and sexuality, poems (always written in the lyrics mode, if not lyrical poems altogether) and had a very small friendly readerhood. I was content in a way, expressing myself when my personal life was in shambles and I started living few hours in the way I do not regret to live. Sep 21st: Rizwanur Rehman’s death changed everything.
I always had a conviction that writers always wait for a love-story to force itself being written by them, a story which encapsulates an era’s zeitgeist, an era’s Weltanschauung, a world-view. A love-story which will explode beyond two individuals and in a flash illuminate the times they inhabit and, preferably, hint towards times as they are changing. A love-story manifest with a passion which is nothing but an impossible dream of a better world, a love-story which fails because the world is not a better place, lovers who are swayed in the tide of the times. A writer cannot conjure that story, he has to wait for it to come.
I won’t say that I found the story in Rizwanur’s tale. But the event was something which a blog on love can never deny, rather it must discard its earlier preoccupations to validate its soul and should take a plunge into the event. I did that. But for the past week, I am facing this dilemma, this contradiction, this bewilderment…how can I write about love in the times of greater bloodwaste? Will it be an escape, a disavowal, an ethical fall? It means, I have not achieved that language still, a language which will seep in the blood which is burning the soil of my land…even when I write about love; picking up scraps of poetry from the streets marked with those stains…
I am talking about a civil-war situation which is raging in the state I am living in, an instance of utter lawlessness or, to be more precise, an instance when lawlessness shows its face as the law. It started almost a year ago when, in the current drive of market-driven industrial development, the government grabbed stretches of lands to set up automobile factories and chemical hubs. West Bengal is populated largely by rural peasants, whose livelihood depends entirely on an agrarian economy. In order to maintain proximity to the capital of the state, the government acquired lands in places which are fertile, at least for the time being, resulting in a snatching of acres of cultivable lands and habitat of my poor countrymen. In the process of an aggressive red-rolling of a post-globalization modernity, villages are being gobbled up by industrial urbanism (a process which was the matrix of meaning of an erotica I attempted earlier in this blog), the basically agrarian structure of the countryside is being rendered peripheral and irrelevant in the face of the future, or – to put it bluntly – being humiliated as being anachronistic.
Resistance and protests were immediate, culminating in the infamous police-firing at unarmed protesters in March 14 of this year (ironically the birthday of Karl Marx and here is a state ruled for the last 30 years by a coalition of leftists and communist parties aided by a bunch of political imbeciles as the opposition); the number of casualties are still not confirmed and lies debatable. Parallel to this ran a sustained streak of violence between the henchmen of the ruling parties and the resistant groups. The center of the events is Nandigram now and villages surrounding it. Hundreds of supporters of the ruling party were evicted from these villages, an inevitable act of retribution after a couple of decades of high-handedness and rule of terror and these people’s obvious support to the land acquisition program. The governmental procedure had been suspended, but an ugly face of the local politics has already bared its fangs. Now the ruling party is hitting back with vengeance. As we celebrate Deepabali – the festival of light – eerie darkness prevails in these villages, people are being evicted from their homes, coerced and violated, women raped and murdered, children killed and orphaned, food and medicine is in utter shortage, road-blocks are cutting off the zones from the rest of the country, governance has either been reduced to zero or has given way to the mission of an ‘un-official’-hoodlum-administration of ‘curbing’ the ‘indiscipline’ which is going on in the name of resistance to ‘industrial development’. In the name of retribution and political retort, armed goons are pouring into the area to ‘teach them lessons’. The police (yes, that villain of this blog for months!) either had aided the henchmen of the powerful, as in March 14 or is silently overlooking the war-situation now. The government has – ironically – withered away in the area and has been replaced by the logistics of the ’survival of the more violent’.
The events sparked a major civil-society movement preceding the Rizwanur issue. And the media had its romp in the circus of blood. The way I obsessively scavenged the net for news on Rizwanur, will I do it for Nandigram now? I am too tired of describing injustice further…But how can I sanitize my hands off the blood which is flowing?
Today starts an event for which I wait for a year: the 13th Kolkata International Film Festival. I was planning to keep a log of the films I will watch in this blog but I am not going there for a couple of days at least; I am not sure if I should go or not, engage in the feast of films for which I was – at least this year because I was not able to visit the event for the last few years – waiting so eagerly when mayhem is continuing in the countryside…and the uniformed fools were zestfully breaking up lovers and couples. The violence may wane down within a couple of days, after the ‘victory’ will be complete, but a narrative of payback will continue as resistant workers get back their dues in the time to come. More people will be prey to the powerful. And Rizwanur’s blood and that of the victims of Nandigram mingles…a stream of blood did meet streams of others’ blood…we missed it how, when and where…
What is the language of love in these bloody times? How can I write about love in the times when so much blood is flowing to the drains?
Excerpts from West Bengal Governor G.K. Gandhi’s Statement on Nandigram, 09/11/07
Source: The Statesman, Nov 11
The ardour of Deepavali has been dampened in the whole State by the events in Nandigram. Several villages in Nandigram are oscillating from the deepest gloom to panic. Large numbers of armed persons from outside the district have, it is undeniable, forced themselves onto villages in Nandigram Block I and II for territorial assertion. Thousands of villagers have consequently been intimidated into leaving their homes in villages such as Daudpur, Amgachi, Jambani, Simulkundu, Brindvanchak, Tekhali, Nainan, Kanongochak, Takpara, Satengabari, Ranichak, Kamalpur, and Keyakhali.
Even as of 4 p.m. this day, I have received phone calls from responsible persons in Nandigram saying that several huts are ablaze. Large numbers of villagers have taken refuge in the local high school in Nandigram, bereft of food and personal security.
At the time of writing, the most accurate description for Nandigram is the one used by our Home Secretary, namely, it has become “a war zone”. No Government or society can allow a war zone to exist without immediate and effective action.
I am fully aware of the fact that, earlier in the year, many villagers in Nandigram who were perceived as sympathizers of the ruling establishment had been obliged to leave the villages and seek shelter in Khejuri. I am also aware of the apprehension that some Maoists, their numbers being unverified, are believed to have entered the area.
Those who had to flee to Khejuri must come back with full confidence and dignity. And no quarter should be given to the cult of violence associated with Maoists. But the manner in which the “recapture” of Nandigram villages is being attempted is totally unlawful and unacceptable.
I find it equally unacceptable that while Nandigram has been ingressed with ease by armed people on the one hand, political and non-political persons trying to reach it have been violently obstructed. Some of them were bearing relief articles for the homeless. The treatment meted to Smt Medha Patkar and other associates for hers last evening was against all norms of civilized political behaviour.
…
I have made it clear that unless these steps are taken within hours, and the syndrome of “capture and recapture” is not ended, the beginnings for a resumed dialogue through the package announced by the Chief Secretary last night will not get off the ground and the peace talks process will remain grounded. Peace talks must resume soon and despite the lateness of the hour, I welcome the pragmatic optimism expressed in this regard by our elder statesman Shri Jyoti Basu.
Let me conclude by saying: Enough is enough. Peace and security should be restored, without any delay, from where they have been evicted from Nandigram.Sd/-
Gopalkrishna Gandhi
9/11/07
Click Pictures for sources and bigger sizes
video documenting the March 14 genocide
Click Thumbnails beneath for websites documenting the events
still trying to find the words to react articulately
CPM thugs will make west bengal a hell
the important part is to remember and remember it in full…
let’s hope our memories doesn’t wither away with time… that what it usually does in this state!
I greatly appreciate your angst and your passion for life and love. If you look around there is blood everywhere – in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, many areas of Africa and Latin America and even in Europe and America (the real stories from China do not see the light of day but there is bloodshed there as well), killers walking into classrooms and mindlessly shooting down children, the list is endless. To me all this bloodshed is symptomatic of a species that is now engaged in making itself extinct. Species reproduction is inverted into species destruction.
You ask a very pertinent question: how can one write on love when there is bloodshed on the streets? But when you poke in to modern love stories often you find that there is ultimately little real human love for humans – there is an inversion there as well – the real love is usually for all other things except the real human beings themselves – this could be money, status, class, caste anything but the actual human beings involved.
Maybe Rizwanur’s case was an exception. But I am not sure anymore. When everything human begins to get distorted by the 7 deadly sins – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride – what you are left with is Hell on Earth. I am not making a religious comment because again if you look into these sins deeply they lead you to the inescapable conclusion that at the root of all is the privatisation of what is essentially a social existence.
When social responsibility and commitment is replaced by the commitment to one and only thing – private aggrandizement – and when such private aggrandizement is declared as the greatest virtue of all – the creation of wealth and its accumulation in private hands on the one hand and a consumerist culture based on the shameless promotion of crass individualism on the other – this situation of inversion is created. Instead of humans loving each other, being compassionate and kind, existing together on the basis of a collective/community way of life you have humans killing each other, individual greed destroying the social basis of existence and on the whole instead of doing things that would enable us to exist we are doing things that would surely make us extinct.
The inversion also destroys logic and reason and there is instead brainwashed, hallucinating robots celebrating this madness – intoxication is called sobriety and sobriety is declared intoxication. You have people spouting hate about communism but if you ask them why you find there is nothing but brainwashing – years of indoctrination right from childhood about how bad communism or any collective/community based thinking is. There is only brainwashing about that one single great virtue – the virtue of private aggrandizement.
It is these rabid believers in private aggrandizement, totally intoxicated by all kinds of false beliefs who spout all kinds of hatred – towards other fellow human beings and communism, towards other religious beliefs, towards other ethnic groups, towards other castes, creeds, classes – actually towards all other humans except oneself. When an entire society is brainwashed into loving only the self and hating all others – can you really have love? Can love be defined by hatred towards all? And isn’t the essence of what we call love today anything but hatred? Do you love me more than anybody else? Does it not translate into do you hate all others and love only me? When this hatred defines love you have a society that has completed this inversion fully.
Life certainly is based on the selfish gene – on self interest. All life exists because all try to preserve the existence of the self. But when this basic self-interest is distorted and used as justification for greed and private aggrandizement then again you have inversion – instead of enabling existence it leads to extinction. Just consider the fact that some of the large carnivorous animals such as lions or tigers mark out a territory for themselves – the minimum territory they need for existence. But there is no greed and private aggrandizement because in lion or tiger society you do not have private property. So lions or tigers, however powerful the individual male maybe do not go about capturing all the territory and driving out all other less powerful lions and tigers from the area – there is no private aggrandizement and accumulation beyond what is needed for existence. Self interest is not transformed into greed and there is no attempt to justify greed and private accumulation as struggle for survival. There is no attempt at brainwashing people into making them believe that greed and private accumulation is natural – it exists from time immemorial – it is a direct result of the natural evolutionary process of the struggle for survival, private property is natural, existence of classes is natural, there have always been poor people and there will always be poor people – what utter nonsense.
I find commie haters as the biggest jokers on planet earth – they don’t really know what they are hating and are instead simply parroting what they have been taught by rote. But if you have a critical mind then you do not hate but you suffer from angst. You think. You suffer pain and feel compassion. This is the true human condition – in my view this is what love in the time of bloodshed is all about! But we shall overcome – I do firmly believe!